At stake in the Gaza genocide is the world itself. To grasp just how “worldly” the stakes are, all we need to do is face the single most distinct feature of this genocide: its prosecution as a genocide necessary for the global order at all costs—even at the cost of the order itself. In its insistence on the genocide, the west has cannibalized the very institutions it had used to shape the world. How, then, do we explain the radical necessity of genocide here? Here, I argue that we need to come to terms with how, since the 1970s at least, Zionism has co-constituted the object we call western civilization. And it has done so primarily by operating as a geopolitical and ideological impasse to decolonization. Zionism is the west’s postcolonial alibi, deferring any reckoning with the west’s colonial history and enduring racial regimes. But the genocide at once reaffirms and destabilizes Zionism’s vocation. Intersecting with the irreversible decline of US empire, the genocide appears as the death knell for an entire age, accelerating the effective unraveling of the international order that stands in for the world, and potentially heralding a kind of unworlding.

Adaptation has been embedded into Homer’s Odyssey since its origins in the oral traditions of ancient Greece. With each new age, creative artists find fresh ways to re-tell the story of the poem’s world and its protagonist—who is himself known for his adaptability—recasting his adventures and quest for home in ways that speak to the concerns of the contemporaneous moment. The range of these adaptations has been vast, with the epic being appropriated sometimes for diametrically opposed purposes: in support of imperialism or to contest it; as a vehicle for patriarchal dominance or feminist autonomy; as a narrative in support of refugees or condemning the indigenous inhabitants of certain lands. Some of these works have themselves become foundational, inspiring stories and genres in their turn, and with the imminent release of Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation, we have a new chance to see what the Odyssey might be in our current moment.

This article explores how predictions about future nanotechnological and neuropharmaceutical applications to medicine further anti-ageing discourse in the present. Products of both research areas enable physiological augmentation, with uses way beyond accepted traditional goals of medicine. But most “nanodreams” have not come to fruition, yet; as such, much popular scientific writing about nanotechnology is “thoroughly science-fictional” in how it imagines its future. Projections about these technologies contribute to devaluing the ageing experience and neglecting the need to address challenges of ageing in the present. To make these points, this article will read two speculative texts alongside one another: a piece of creative science fiction and a predictive popular science account. Ray Kurzweil’s How to Create a Mind propagates brain–computer interfaces, and Jeffrey Moore’s The Memory Artists deals with neuropharmaceuticals. Such parallel reading risks conflating different genres, narrative forms and contexts, obfuscating the purpose and possibilities of either genre. But it helps illustrate how ideas of an augmented human species have begun structuring social belief systems that shine through creative writing that joins in pitching, rather than effectively critiquing, these technologies as holding the fountain of youth.

Based on the past year’s traffic stats to the Humanities Indicators web site, the submitted article takes a question-based approach to answer what Americans seem most interested in learning about the humanities. Using infographics and short summary paragraphs, the report walks through key data points about the current state of the humanities using the most recent available data from the federal government or surveys conducted by the project.

Today’s landscape of public archaeology foregrounds intentional practices, ensuring that archaeologists are aware of our actions and their repercussions. While we are intentional in our planning and implementation of public projects, this article argues that we are not adequately prepared for ending them. Many projects die for various reasons, get passed on to new generations of practitioners, and some simply come to a natural ending. A lack of discussion around project death, however, leads to unintentional endings or confusing continuities. Public archaeology is an intense emotional experience, and feelings of betrayal can emerge when a practitioner or the community partner exits the partnership unexpectedly. This article explores these issues from the perspective of an American scholar at a small public university and asks what an intentional ending to a public archaeology project looks like. It also asks how we can co-create and co-manage such an intentional ending with our community partners. Rather than fear the death of a project, there may be power in embracing the grief of ending a collaboration and soothing the emotional rupture. Finally, it concludes by suggesting that a rite of passage or celebration of the end may be necessary to mark the project as complete, allowing the partners to mourn and move on.

Generative A.I. deepfake images, videos, and other content, overtaking social media apps and other digital content, commonly referred to as A.I. slop, are creating a media ecosystem defined by content chaos. The decisions of big tech companies to program algorithms that favor, and reward in monetary terms, overly emotionally triggering material continue to amplify information pollution. As a climate media scholar, the author argues that popularizing information pollution terminology, which labels generative A.I. slop as contaminating social media apps and platforms, would focus attention on the social and political harms. This content fuels disinformation campaigns and is diminishing public trust. In addition, labeling A.I. slop with a pollution metaphor brings into the lens more readily the environmental harms of generative artificial intelligence. Examples discussed include the cratered monetary value of AI-generated art, the A.I. agent-only social network Moltbook, misinformation and disinformation following extreme weather disasters, and a creative direct action by anti-data center activists in Quilicura, Chile.

This article examines not only who is recognized as legitimate within historical narratives but also how the very standards of historical validity have shifted over time. It was sparked by a question that interrupted an otherwise ordinary lecture: “What does that have to do with history?” Asked during a discussion of the Stonewall uprising, the question did more than challenge a specific topic; it unsettled deeper assumptions about what counts as historical knowledge and who has the authority to define it. Rather than dismissing the moment, I treat it as an opportunity to reflect on the fragile boundaries of the discipline and the political forces that shape them. Drawing on memory studies and historiographical debates—from E. H. Carr and Carl Becker to Elizabeth Jelin—I discuss how mainstream accounts and public policies determine which lives are archived and which remain marginal. In light of recent US executive actions seeking to restrict how history is taught, the classroom has become a contested space where perspectives can be fostered or silenced. I argue that teaching history responsibly means confronting uncomfortable pasts, embracing intellectual friction, and recognizing that students themselves participate in history’s ongoing construction.

My artistic research-action, “Eu sou uma árvore” [“I am a tree”] (2019), performs the manipulation of images of various trees of the world leading to the appearance of living beings within them. For Indigenous peoples, trees are relatives, treated with respect and harmony. This article discusses the value of popularizing Indigenous knowledge by offering an overview of Indigenous debates related to higher education in Brazil. This analysis is part of an overarching study of what I call the fourth moment of Indigenous history. My aim is to emphasize the importance of interdisciplinarity, crossings, and the rise of counter-narratives in different fields of artistic-cultural practice and scientific research. After discussing the place of others in Brazilian higher education, I discuss my research at the Museum-Lab of Art, Science and Technology to discuss the dissemination of scientific knowledge in ways accessible to all.

It is rather tempting for philosophers, and I know this from experience, to reduce the topic of “Public Political Philosophy” to a “what” question and a “how” question. Or, if you prefer, to a question of definition and a question of method. Here, by contrast, I focus on the “who” of it. Who are you to be doing it, and, more importantly, who are you going to be doing it with? This matters because, when trying to do anything along these lines, the one thing I know for sure is that you will not be doing it alone.

Inspired by teaching Black kindergarteners at the White Rose Mission in New York City in the 1890s, Alice Dunbar-Nelson wrote 12 stories about children in an urban neighborhood targeted for uplift. Around 1900, she drafted a table of contents for the collection, The Annals of ‘Steenth Street. The collection was never published as such, but some of these stories were published individually in multiple periodicals over several decades. Dunbar-Nelson’s stories center on the neighborhood’s children and their perspectives. This was literature intended, at least in part, for a child audience. Both the content and the publication history of Dunbar-Nelson’s stories raise important points for scholars of African American children’s literature. Our discussion focuses on the story Dunbar-Nelson intended to appear first in her collection, “The Revenge of James Brown,” published in the Chicago Daily News in 1899 and in the Methodist Episcopal Church School Publications’ weekly paper, the Classmate, in 1930. This story extends notions of where we might look for children’s literature of the Harlem Renaissance to include print venues not often examined with Black children in mind. Moreover, Dunbar-Nelson’s revisions of this story allow for complex considerations of her representations of Black childhood. This essay’s authors are co-founders of the Black digital humanities project, Taught by Literature, the work of which includes creating a freely available digital edition of “The Revenge of James Brown” and Dunbar-Nelson’s other ’Steenth Street stories, working with K-12 educators to create materials to facilitate teaching these stories to children in the present.

This introduction to the Creole Gardens as Decolonial Practice: Regrowth, Recycling, Resistance and Repair issue of Public Humanities draws on fieldwork undertaken in the gardens of the Seychelles and Guadeloupe in 2024 and 2025, as well as on Edouard Glissant’s definition of the “jardin creole” as resistance to unitary and hegemonic attitudes toward identity, culture, and belonging. Such gardens have been recognized as a long-standing feature of Creole societies past and present. As a legacy and antithesis of the plantation economy, they continue to be mobilized to promote biodiversity against monocropping, human subsistence over profit, and sustainable small-scale agricultural practices. We present the creole garden around four key words—“regrowth,” “recycling,” “resistance,” and “repair”—that have emerged through our fieldwork observations, testimonies from horticultural activists, scholarship and theory on plots and gardens of the Creole world, as well as the recent proliferation of cultural and artistic interventions on gardens that contributors to this issue chronicle and analyze. Our work demonstrates that botany, pharmacy, foodways, and horticulture can be tools of resistance that self-empower marginalized peoples of African, European, and Asian heritage by generating, from displacements and uprooting, new cultures and new solidarities. Indeed, in the garden, the body interacts with the collective and with the land to provide dignity, pleasure, and healing; and the garden itself is as an “archive-repertoire” of the connected Atlantic and Indian Oceans, which activates hidden pasts and futures that our issue explores.

Originalism, the notion that judges should interpret the Constitution according to the meaning it had at the time it was ratified, is usually associated with expanding executive power. I suggest, however, that the opposite is true: originalism means limiting executive power. If we interpret the Constitution as understood at the time it was created, the question is: What was in the collective mind of the Colonists when they wrote and ratified the Constitution? To answer that question, I return to “the most famous sermon preached in pre-Revolutionary America”—Jonathan Mayhew’s 1750 A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the Higher Powers: with some reflections on the resistance made to King Charles. In this sermon, read as John Adams says, “by everybody,” Mayhew, thoroughly schooled in Republican thought and English constitutionalism, proposed that “unlimited submission” does not exist, and that the monarch’s powers are always limited. I conclude by drawing parallels between Mayhew’s descriptions of Charles I’s crimes and President Donald Trump’s actions since his second election.

Arguably, recent and prospective developments within artificial intelligence are a fascination within contemporary technoculture. The dawning of a new era that is characterised by the various impacts of these technological and scientific advances leads to questions about the type of subject that will inherit and inhabit the consequences of these developments. This paper will examine the role that speculative fiction plays as a site of critical engagement in investigating some of the more urgent questions posed by the intersection between humans and technology, such as the social consequences of projected technologies and the possibilities of changing embodiment, and particularly how these issues prove to be of immense importance for the gendered subject. The essays contained within Jeanette Winderson’s non-fictional publication 12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next (2021) provide a perceptive insight into both the promises and the pitfalls of AI technology for the future female and embodied experience. Winterson’s thought-provoking contemplations will be read alongside her fictional novels, The Stone Gods (2007) and Frankissstein (2019), to consider how she utilises the genre of speculative fiction to explore existing representations of gender whilst working to define new transhuman subjects. A recurring theme throughout these novels is the way in which AI, despite its liberating and transcendent potential, is imagined as the inevitable perpetuation of female subjugation.

The Victorians were devoted to spectacles, from large-scale dioramas to the more modest magic lantern shows which became the staple of the popular lecture circuit. Taking advantage of developments in a whole range of new optical technologies, they offered their audiences both education and entertainment.1 Playing with illusion and a sense of wonder, they broke down the barriers between stillness and life, absence and presence, opening up new vistas for imaginative participation. This roundtable brings together award-winning creative practitioners who continue in this tradition, working in diverse ways with the latest developments in optical technologies, while also using their respective forms of expertise to explore the legacies of Victorian science and culture, reanimating the past for contemporary audiences. All three articles show how humanities projects can draw on artistic forms to enhance research and to widen public participation.

Handling and making objects can make an important contribution to learning, bringing sensory dimensions to understanding technology, style, and functions of objects; thus I use object-based learning as building blocks in my teaching of university students. In the context of the recent pandemic, I had dual concerns about the absence of physical engagement with objects and their materiality (during the long period classes pivoted online) and about the individual and collective well-being of our students, so I designed a new activity to address this in the context of an archaeology module on Minoan Crete. I asked each student to make their own votive offering, photograph/catalogue it, and place it in an experiential/experimental space by writing a prayer or other piece of creative writing about it. In this paper, I describe and reflect on the activity, using three years of collected data, together with student reflections made at the time of making the votive, plus additional interviews conducted later.

Our article aims to show how right-wing women in positions of power like Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni are able to manipulate feminism to their political advantage. Stemming from our previous study on Meloni’s particular brand of conservative feminism, we analyze the disorienting ability of the right to appropriate and manipulate the traditional language of the left. We are interested in this creation of confusion through rhetorical somersaults on the Italian political stage, specifically how the right appropriates feminist language and themes to further neoliberal economics, neoconservative morals, and a nationalist agenda that is hostile to women, nonwhite people, migrants, and LGBTQIA+ communities. As a case study, we offer an analysis of the ideas of one of Italy’s most prominent gender-critical feminists, Marina Terragni, who challenges assumptions about feminism’s ties to the left. Promoting a strictly binary vision, Terragni highlights the fault lines in the relationship between traditional and progressive feminism.

Anatomy has always been a complex subject to teach and learn. Historically, anatomy has been taught via cadaveric dissection, a modality that has declined in recent years due to a shortage of body donations and a pedagogical shift in using virtual reality and technological tools. Today, the teaching of anatomy in medical schools worldwide incorporates the medical humanities. While theoretical knowledge of anatomy is certainly necessary in the healthcare setting, recentering the focus of healthcare from mechanistic models of the body to its transposed context in literary forms such as poetry offer an alternative way of viewing the body, from a mechanistic model to a holistic one that unites the body’s biology with a patient’s selfhood. Through an analysis of two ekphrastic poems about Dr. Nicolaes Tulp’s famous anatomy lessons by contemporary American poet Linda Bierds, I argue that the body (cadaver) that has been deconstructed through anatomical dissection can be reconstructed in poetry via a “poetic dissection.” As a case study, Bierds’s poems demonstrate how the sensory experience of anatomical dissection can reframe dissection as a poetic tool, enhancing the ways in which anatomy, and by extension medical humanities, are taught in medical schools.

Robert Frost’s Readers: The Racial Road Not Taken seeks to make “good trouble” by reading our country’s most cherished poem to challenge our country’s most potent shibboleth. “The Road Not Taken” is America’s iconic and most misunderstood poem, and I argue its reception speaks volumes about the current backlash to the Black Lives Matter movement that has resulted in efforts to scrub our troubled racial past from our museums, schools, and public places. I argue that for over a century readers have failed Frost’s chief challenge, which has been to encourage us to think about the speaker’s “nonconformism,” and our own. We have failed because since 1915, the year the poem appeared, most readers have seen fit to define their cherished nonconformism by ignoring the racial segregation and discrimination that has long befouled the nation and continues to plague us. This article chronicles the many historical events since the early twentieth century that might have encouraged readers to connect their free thinking with considerations of race in America, but did not. Instead, generations of scholars, readers, and advertisers have been mum about the poem’s relevance to matters racial.

“What is Africa to me?” asks Countee Cullen in his famous poem, “Heritage,” which first appeared in 1925 in the special issue of Survey Graphic: “Harlem Mecca of the New Negro”; the question haunts not only this magazine issue but also the anthology it inspired, Alain Locke’s The New Negro (1925), and it is a question which Black American authors have wrestled with ever since. Cullen’s poem has been widely studied, but not much work has been done on its placement in this special issue of Survey Graphic, especially considering the fact that it directly follows Alain Locke’s article, “The Art of the Ancestors.” Clearly, there is a dialogue going on between the authors featured in this magazine about African art, African American art, and the transnational relationship between the two. In this article, I do re-readings of “Heritage” both as it appeared in Color, Cullen’s first book of verse, and also as it appeared in this special issue of Survey Graphic. Ultimately, I argue that “Heritage” has to be understood as a collaborative poem, especially in its original incarnation, and it is a poem that in its various versions is also in argument with itself.

Not only do politics and society struggle to make sense of current and future existential challenges, but science, especially in inter- and transdisciplinary endeavours, tackles the multifarious and often inextricably linked emergencies of our time. This contribution explores the intersection of cutting-edge microbiome science and literary works of art and its vital role in Public Humanities agendas. By the example of Adam Dickinson’s unique poetry collection Anatomic (2018), the paper demonstrates how the emerging, rapidly growing, and paradigm-shifting knowledge of the microbiome is a symbol for the porousness of science and literature, which not only fuels scientific and aesthetic innovation by enabling manifold exchanges beyond disciplinary and academic boundaries but also points towards its specific precariousness. As not only the borders of science and literature become porous as a prerequisite and result of circulatory processes of collaborative knowledge production but also the borders of (human) bodies as the sites of this knowledge-making do, there seems to be nothing less to negotiate than what it means to be human per se pointing towards modes of being human yet to be imagined by science and literature, within and beyond Academia alike.